Yea, and jobs that selected by university degree wanted to implicitly select for class
Making the path to go to a university more accessible is admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy designed to enforce its implications on universities was always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning universities into dysfunctional and corrupt quasi-businesses, and not really causing a significant de-stratification of job opportunities on balance at all
And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools, which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a high federal level.
Yes, like I said before, this hasn't de-stratified the job market. Jobs that want to select applicants by class can find plenty of ways to do so easily
E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't been subsidized, selecting among universities for especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones, baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the interview process, etc
I think that's effectively what a lot of people here are arguing they should be. You're not going to have cheap and quality research institutions (except via financial aid/loans). You can imagine different systems--and they exist to some degree in Europe. It's presumably not a terrible system but it probably does tend to be more exclusive.
